Nativity reminds us of true meaning of the holiday

A group of 31 has been standing or sitting for four weeks in front of Batavia's Immanuel Lutheran Church. They're not waiting for the appearance of Hannah Montana. They're waiting for the coming of Jesus.

They don't mind the rain, ice and snow they've had to endure. The cold weather doesn't bother them because they are life-size figures cut out of half-inch plywood.

Stretching across most of the front of the large church building, they depict scenes from the Nativity story, beginning with the Annunciation and ending with the visit of the magi. The panorama includes around 30 animals, and it is striking.

"It's an amazing thing!" says pastor Ron Weidler, a big smile with a touch of awe spreading across his face. "They are done in the most wonderful, vivid colors -- like it's alive!"

The display is the brainchild of Jim Hagemann and Dan Gatz, both of whom were leaders on the board of trustees.

"We had been talking about a nativity scene for two or three years," Hegamann says. "Then we were up at church one night and it seemed so dark. We thought that putting up this lighted display would be a great way to tell the Christmas story to the community."

He estimates that over 50 people contributing more than 1,500 hours did significant work on the project, beginning in early September and finishing the Friday after Thanksgiving. Forty-five pieces of plywood and 30 gallons of paint were donated. Hagemann, Anna Sedberry, Kris Ford and Jenna Dodd did most of the art work.

It's difficult to do artistic justice to this season of the year. Christians want to portray in grand -- even grandiose -- style the birth of a baby to a nobody couple in a nobody village at a nobody time.

That's the nature of our devotion, and the Immanuel Lutheran display carries some of that feeling. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to have used one of those small coffee table creches, placing it on the ground in a bunch of bushes in an out-of-the-way place away from the immediate front of the building.

But then nobody would see it, and what kind of witness would that be? The people at Immanuel want the whole area to know what happened there in Bethlehem 2000 years ago.

Christians believe the birth of Jesus was a special event, with consequences that are at the same time very personal and yet earthshaking. In words attributed to the great preacher Phillips Brooks (lyricist of "O Little Town of Bethlehem"), "all the armies that ever marched, and all the navies that were ever built, and all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has that one solitary life."

So we use the beautiful to celebrate the ugly, the large to celebrate the small, and the extraordinary to celebrate the ordinary, because behind the ugly and small and ordinary there lies an event that can't be captured by any artist. We make that first Christmas larger than life, because, in reality, it was that.